Closing summary
In a White House address, Joe Biden tried to reassure Americans about what fighter jets shot down over North America in recent days, saying there were no signs the still-unidentified objects were connected to China or used for surveillance. Earlier in the day, a Georgia court released portions of a special grand jury’s report into Donald Trump’s election meddling campaign, which indicated jurors were worried about being lied to, but did not reveal if they think the former president or his allies committed crimes. The ball is now in Atlanta-area district attorney Fani Willis’s court, since she’s using the document to determine the next steps in her investigation of the former president’s attempt to overturn his 2020 election loss in Georgia.
Here’s what else happened today:
Senator John Fetterman checked himself into the hospital to receive treatment for depression. The Democrat’s election in Pennsylvania last November was crucial to the party gaining an outright majority in the Senate.
Biden wants to speak with China’s president Xi Jinping after the spy balloon incident, though it’s not clear when the leaders plan to jump on the phone.
Nikki Haley thinks Trump could pass one of the “mental competency tests” she wants to force politicians older than 75 to take.
Democrats are beginning to worry that Biden is too old to run for re-election.
A bill to prevent police from using search warrants to access data from menstrual tracking apps failed in Virginia’s legislature, apparently due to interference from Republican governor Glenn Youngkin.
A theory has emerged from the amateur radio community about what exactly a US jet shot down over Canada’s Yukon territory.
The unidentified object, one of three downed by American planes in recent days, may have been a “pico” balloon equipped with a GPS module and a solar panel that was launched from Illinois last October, and in the middle of circumnavigating the earth for the seventh time, according to this report on hobbyist website RTL-SDR.
As the article makes clear, the details of the K9YO-15 amateur radio balloon and US and Canadian authorities’ description of the object encountered on 11 February sure seem to line up:
The launch blog post indicates that the K9YO-15 balloon was flying a silver mylar 32” sphere SAG balloon which appears to be this one from balloons.online. Unlike latex or rubber weather balloons which inflate and stretch as they rise into lower atmospheric pressures, these mylar balloons can’t stretch, so their fully inflated ground size will be the same as their size at high altitudes, meaning the pico balloon won’t get much bigger than 32”. The payload was a GPS module, Arduino, SI5351 used as a WSPR and APRS transmitter and a solar panel, all together weighing 16.4 grams. A pentagon memo notes that the object shot down over Canada was a “small metallic balloon with a tethered payload” which fits the description of the pico balloon exactly.
The K9YO-15 balloon ceased all WSPR telemetry transmissions while flying just below Alaska since Feb 11 00:18 UTC (just before sunset in Alaska when the solar panels would stop working).
By using NOAA wind models and the last known location by Alaska, K9YO-15 was projected to have been over Yukon when the US Air Force shot down the unknown balloon object at Feb 11 20:41 UTC (3:41 PM EST / 1:41 PM Yukon time according to Canadian Defense Minister Anand). Reports put the altitude of the shot down object at approximately 40,000ft (~12000 meters), which matches the projected ~11500 meters of K9YO-15. Based on the previous days transmission times, it is suspected that if it were operational, the balloon would have begun transmitting again sometime later in the Yukon afternoon when the sun was stronger, but no transmissions have been seen.
A town in Ohio is demanding answers after a train carrying toxic chemicals derailed in their community, but the Guardian’s Lauren Aratani and Michael Sainato report that rail executives refused to provide any in a meeting last night:
Nearly two weeks after a train carrying toxic chemicals derailed in East Palestine, Ohio, community members packed a local high school auditorium on Wednesday night wanting answers to their health and safety concerns.
Norfolk Southern Corporation, the Atlanta-based operator of the derailed train, ultimately skipped the meeting, which was the first community meeting in the town of 5,000 people since the incident.
“We know that many are rightfully angry and frustrated right now. Unfortunately, after consulting with community leaders, we have become increasingly concerned about the growing physical threats to our employees and members of the community around this event stemming from increasing likelihood of the participation of outside parties,” the company said in a statement. “With that in mind, Norfolk Southern will not be in attendance this evening.”
Updated
The New York Times has obtained an email from John Fetterman’s wife to the Democratic senator’s supporters:
Email from @giselefetterman to supporters: "our family is in for some difficult days ahead, and we ask for your compassion on the path to recovery."
— Annie Karni (@anniekarni) February 16, 2023
"I'm sad, and worried, as any wife and mother would be."
Democratic senator Fetterman seeks treatment for depression
John Fetterman, the newly elected Democratic senator whose victory in Pennsylvania gave Joe Biden’s allies an outright majority in the chamber after last November’s midterms, has checked himself into the hospital for clinical depression, his office announced.
“Last night, Senator John Fetterman checked himself into Walter Reed National Military Medical Center to receive treatment for clinical depression. While John has experienced depression off and on throughout his life, it only became severe in recent weeks,” Fetterman’s chief of staff Adam Jentleson said in a statement.
“On Monday, John was evaluated by Dr. Brian P. Monahan, the Attending Physician of the United States Congress. Yesterday, Dr. Monahan recommended inpatient care at Walter Reed. John agreed, and he is receiving treatment on a voluntary basis. After examining John, the doctors at Walter Reed told us that John is getting the care he needs, and will soon be back to himself.”
The three recent shootdowns are among the more mysterious national security happenings in recent time, particularly because days have passed since they occurred, and Washington has yet to come out with an explanation of what American jets encountered in the skies.
But Joe Biden seems to be preparing Americans for the possibility that the unidentified objects were simply innocuous vessels in the wrong place at the wrong time. While he didn’t say what was shot down in his White House speech today, he did note that he asked American intelligence agencies to look into reports of UFOs.
“When I came into office, I instructed our intelligence community to take a broad look at the phenomenon of unidentified aerial objects,” Biden said. “We know that a range of entities including countries, companies and research organizations operate objects at altitudes for purposes that are not nefarious, including legitimate scientific research.”
He also noted that “our military and the Canadian military are seeking to recover the debris so we can learn more about these three objects.” There’s no indication there that they’ve managed to get their hands on them yet, even though it’s been days since they were downed.
The president announced he would look to speak with China’s leader Xi Jinping in the wake of the downing of a spy balloon belonging to Beijing off American’s eastern coast.
“The other thing I want to point out is that we are going to keep our allies and the Congress contemporaneously informed of all we know and all we learn, and I expect to be speaking with President Xi, and I hope we have we are going to get to the bottom, as I make no apologies for taking down that balloon,” Biden said.
He also noted that, “Our (experts) have lifted components of the Chinese balloon’s payload off the ocean floor, we’re analyzing them as I speak, and what we learn will strengthen our capabilities.”
Biden says the government is coming up with practices to better detect and deal with unknown aerial objects in the wake of the recent shootdowns over North America.
“I’ve directed my team to come back to me with sharper rules for how we will deal with these unidentified objects moving forward, distinguishing between those that are likely to pose safety and security risks that necessitate action and those that do not,” Biden said.
“But make no mistake: if any object presents a threat to the safety, security of the American people, I will take it down. I’ll be sharing with Congress these classified policy parameters when they’re completed, and they’ll remain classified so we don’t give our roadmap to our enemies to try to evade our defenses.”
He also addressed why the United States found itself suddenly responding to three unidentified objects in its airspace just days after shooting down a confirmed Chinese spy balloon.
“We don’t have any evidence that there has been a sudden increase in the number of objects in the sky. We’re now just seeing more of them, partially because the steps we’ve taken to increase our radars, to narrow our radars, and we have to keep adapting our approach to dealing with these challenges.”
Updated
Biden says downed UFOs likely not for surveillance
Joe Biden says the intelligence services haven’t determined the purpose of the three objects American planes shot down in recent days, but there’s no sign they were used for surveillance or connected to China.
“Our intelligence community is still assessing all three incidences. They’re reporting to me daily and will continue the urgent efforts to do so, and I will communicate that to the Congress,” Biden said in an address from the White House.
“We don’t yet know exactly what these three objects were, but nothing right now suggests they were related to China’s spy balloon program, or they were surveillance vehicles from other any other country. The intelligence community’s current assessment is that these three objects were most likely balloons tied to private companies, recreation or research institutions, studying weather or conducting other scientific research.”
Updated
Joe Biden has started his address about the UFOs shot down over North America in recent weeks, as well as the Chinese spy balloon.
Follow along here for the latest.
At today’s White House briefing, press secretary Karine Jean-Pierre was asked about Nikki Haley’s proposal that politicians over the age of 75 undergo “mental competency tests”.
Here’s what she had to say about it:
White House Press Sec. Karine Jean-Pierre responds to 2024 presidential candidate Nikki Haley saying politicians over 75 should have to take a mental competency test:
— The Recount (@therecount) February 16, 2023
“Maybe they’re forgetting the wins that this president has had ... but I’m happy to remind them anytime.” pic.twitter.com/Jzpnt9oYRO
Some improving reading – alas, not about inflation – while we await Joe Biden’s remarks on balloons and UFOs. From our Washington bureau, Joan E Greve interviews Ro Khanna, the California progressive congressman, about the direction of Biden’s Democratic party…
For Ro Khanna, the best part of Joe Biden’s State of the Union address last Tuesday came within the first 10 minutes. Touting the creation of 800,000 manufacturing jobs since he took office, the president boasted that the revitalization of America’s middle class is already under way:
For decades, the middle class has been hollowed out … Too many good-paying manufacturing jobs moved overseas. Factories closed down. Now, thanks to what you’ve all done, we’re exporting American products and creating American jobs.”
Khanna, from California, interpreted the remark as somewhat of a vindication for his political philosophy. Like the progressive Vermont senator Bernie Sanders, who appointed Khanna co-chair of his 2020 presidential campaign, the congressman has long argued for a rebalancing of trade relationships.
By investing in US industry and ensuring fair pay and benefits for all workers, Khanna believes, Democrats can champion what he calls “a new economic patriotism”.
“I think [Biden’s] speech is a nod in that direction,” Khanna told the Guardian. “You’re having now the kind of moderate wing affirm the direction that Sanders and I want to take the party.”
Read on…
Biden to speak about Chinese spy balloons
An update from the White House: at 2pm, Joe Biden will deliver remarks about the Chinese spy balloons/UFOs shot down over the US – or as the White House statement puts it, “the United States’ response to recent aerial objects”.
Republicans (and, to be fair, Democrats) have been pressuring the administration to say more.
In the meanwhile, here’s what China said about US balloons earlier today:
And here, in the interests of balance and/or reading about UFOs, is what the head of national investigations for the British UFO Research Association had to say this morning:
Updated
Good news for Donald Trump in a new poll out today, from Quinnipiac University (#GoBobcats) in Connecticut.
The survey puts the former president six points ahead of Ron DeSantis, the Florida governor, in a notional 14-candidate field for the Republican presidential nomination.
Trump got 42% support and DeSantis 36%. DeSantis has not declared his candidacy but is widely expected to do so. The only Republican other than Trump to have thrown their hat into the ring, the former South Carolina governor Nikki Haley, got 5% support in the Quinnipiac poll – in this case not quite enough to suggest DeSantis would beat Trump without her in the race.
But other candidates whose greatest selling point might be simply not being Trump – and therefore not being in legal jeopardy over election subversion, hush money payments, tax affairs, the retention of classified records and an allegation of rape – did attract small measures of support, pointing to the possibility that a divided field might again hand Trump the nomination without requiring him to win a majority, as was the case in 2016.
To wit: the former vice-president Mike Pence got 4% support and so did the former secretary of state Mike Pompeo.
No one else – Ted Cruz (who says he isn’t running), Chris Christie, even the anti-Trump Liz Cheney – managed to attract more than 2% support.
The poll also asked respondents to choose between a field of four: Trump, DeSantis, Haley and Pence. In that contest, Trump won 43%-41%, with 6% for Haley and 4% for Pence.
In nominal general election match-ups, Joe Biden beat Trump 48%-46% but lost 47%-46% to DeSantis.
Here, meanwhile, is what Sarah Palin thinks of DeSantis and why governors should stay governors, which she famously didn’t:
According to the Associated Press, the investigation into Joe Biden’s possession of classified documents has stretched to his alma mater, the University of Delaware, to which he donated the records of his Senate service:
The FBI searched the University of Delaware in recent weeks for classified documents as part of its investigation into the potential mishandling of sensitive government records by Joe Biden.
The search, first reported by CNN, was confirmed to the Associated Press by a person familiar with the matter who was not authorized to discuss it publicly and spoke on condition of anonymity. The person would not say whether anything was found.
A justice department special counsel is investigating how classified documents from Biden’s time as vice-president and senator came to end up in his home and former office – and whether any mishandling involved criminal intent or was unintentional. Biden’s personal lawyers disclosed in January that a small batch of documents with classified markings had been found weeks earlier in his former Washington office, and they have since allowed FBI searches of multiple properties.
The university is Biden’s alma mater. In 2011, Biden donated his records from his 36 years serving in the US Senate to the school. The documents arrived on 6 June 2012, according to the university, which released photos of the numbered boxes being unloaded at the university alongside blue and gold balloons.
The day so far
We’ve finally been able to see part of the Georgia special grand jury’s report into Donald Trump’s election meddling campaign, which indicated jurors were worried about being lied to, but which did not reveal if they think the former president or his allies committed crimes. It’s now up to Atlanta-area district attorney Fani Willis to answer that question, since she’s using the report to determine her next steps as she uncovers details of the former president’s attempt to overturn his 2020 election loss in Georgia.
Here’s what else has happened today so far:
Nikki Haley thinks Trump could pass one of the “mental competency tests” she wants to force politicians older than 75 to take.
Democrats are beginning to worry that Joe Biden is too old to run for re-election.
A bill to prevent police from using search warrants to access data from menstrual tracking apps failed in Virginia’s legislature, apparently due to interference from Republican governor Glenn Youngkin.
Nikki Haley seemed to throw a little bit of shade at her former boss and fellow presidential contender Donald Trump when she announced her campaign for the White House yesterday.
In a speech launching her campaign, the former UN ambassador suggested that politicians over 75 should take a “mental competency test” in order to hold office. Trump would qualify for such a test, since he’s 76.
But in an interview with Fox News, Haley didn’t take the bait when asked how she thought the former president would fare on her proposed test:
Republican presidential candidate Nikki Haley, when asked how Donald Trump would do on her proposed mental competency test for politicians over the age of 75:
— The Recount (@therecount) February 16, 2023
“I think he did great the last time he did it. I have no reason to think he wouldn’t do well this time.” pic.twitter.com/0YesQgZzOP
Jonathan Martin of Politico is out with a fascinating look at Democrats’ current chief dilemma: the nagging feeling Joe Biden is too old to run for re-election in 2024 (he’s 80 now and would be 82 if sworn in for a second term), versus the competing sense they don’t want anyone else to run. Not, particularly, Biden’s vice-president, Kamala Harris.
Citing an unnamed senator, Martin writes that “the party ha[s] to devise ‘an alignment of interest’ with the president to get him off the ‘narcotic’ of the office”.
An unnamed governor, Martin reports, “mused about just how little campaigning Biden would be able to do”.
A House member “after saying that, of course, Democrats should renominate the president told me to turn off my phone and then demanded to know who else was out there and said Harris wasn’t an option”.
Another lawmaker, who Martin says was his “favourite” source for the story, “recalled speaking to Jill Biden and, hoping to plant a seed about a one-term declaration of victory, told her how her husband should be celebrated for saving democracy. When I asked if I could use any of that on the record, the lawmaker shot back: ‘Absolutely not.’”
In sum, Martin reports that Democrats think Biden can beat Donald Trump again, if Trump is the Republican candidate, but they do not have such confidence against other candidates – or, particularly, in Harris. The politics of saying that, however, are tricky:
… To express their concerns about a woman of Jamaican and Indian descent touches, to put it mildly, on highly sensitive matters.
More to the point, Democrats have seen what happens when anyone in their party openly criticises Harris – they’re accused by activists and social-media critics of showing, at best, racial and gender insensitivity. This doesn’t stifle concerns about her prospects, of course, it just pushes them further underground or into the shadows of background quotes.
Such as this, from a House Democrat: “The Democrats who will need to speak out on her are from the Congressional Black Caucus, no white member is going to do it.”
Members of the CBC, however, are either supportive of Harris or no more willing to give public voice to their unease with the vice president than the above lawmaker.
Martin’s piece is a very good read, and it is here.
Republican senator Lindsey Graham waged a lengthy and ultimately futile battle to avoid testifying before the special grand jury in Georgia.
CNN asked him about his statements, in light of jurors’ concerns that some of the witnesses they heard from may have lied:
Lindsey Graham told me “yes” he’s confident in his testimony to the Georgia special grand jury in light of the recommendations that some witnesses should be indicted for perjury. Says he hasn’t heard from the district attorney’s office after his testimony
— Manu Raju (@mkraju) February 16, 2023
An ally of Donald Trump, Graham asked Georgia’s Republican secretary of state whether he could throw out legally cast ballots in the days following the 2020 election.
The portions of the special grand jury report made public today do not reveal how the Fulton County jurors weighed in on the biggest question before them: should Donald Trump be charged with a crime?
The 26 jurors’ views on that are presumably answered in parts of the document that remain confidential and are in the hands of district attorney Fani Willis as she determines whether to bring charges based on the panel’s findings.
In the introduction, the jurors note that in the report, they “set forth for the Court our recommendations on indictments and relevant statutes, including the votes by the grand jurors. This includes the votes respective to each topic, indicated in a ‘Yea/Nay/Abstain format throughout.” The sections where these votes were disclosed are not among those made public.
The jurors also made a special point in the introduction to note that they unanimously found that there was no evidence of fraud in the 2020 election in the state. That may perhaps be a reaction to the statements of some of the witnesses they heard from.
“The grand jury heard extensive testimony on the subject of alleged election fraud from poll workers, investigators, technical experts and State of Georgia employees and officials, as well as from persons still claiming that such fraud took place,” the introduction reads.
Grand jury report reveals jurors' fear witnesses may have lied under oath
The special grand jury empaneled in the Georgia’s Fulton county worried that at least one of the 75 witnesses it heard from may have lied under oath, according to portions of their report released today.
They also determined “by a unanimous vote that no widespread fraud took place in the Georgia 2020 presidential election that could result in overturning that election,” the jurors wrote in the report’s introduction, which was released along with its conclusion and a brief chapter outlining the perjury concerns.
The introduction outlines how the grand jurors were selected in May 2022 and began hearing testimony and reviewing physical and digital evidence at the start of the following month before concluding in December. The conclusion deals mostly with formalities, while the report’s eighth chapter consists of two sentences in which the jurors worry over the veracity of some of the testimony they heard.
“A majority of the Grand Jury believes that perjury may have been committed by one or more witnesses testifying before it. The Grand Jury recommends that the District Attorney seek appropriate indictments for such crimes where the evidence is compelling,” the chapter reads.
Updated
Georgia court releases part of Trump grand jury report
A portion of the special grand jury’s report into Donald Trump’s election meddling campaign in Georgia has been released:
🚨BREAKING: A Georgia judge has released parts of a Fulton County special purpose grand jury's final report examining efforts by Donald Trump and his allies to overturn the results of the 2020 election.
— Anna Bower (@AnnaBower) February 16, 2023
Here's the first few pages⬇️: pic.twitter.com/AZTRvMbUEr
The parts released today include the introduction, conclusion, and Section VIII, in which the grand jurors express concerns that witnesses lied under oath during their testimony. Here's the rest of the released portions: pic.twitter.com/0oBrubdLiO
— Anna Bower (@AnnaBower) February 16, 2023
We’re reading the document now, and will let you know what it says.
Another Republican who is a potential presidential contender in 2024 is Virginia’s governor Glenn Youngkin. The Guardian’s Richard Luscombe reports that it appears his administration acted to thwart a bill that would ban search warrants from being issued for menstrual tracking apps:
The Republican governor of Virginia, Glenn Youngkin, appears to have thwarted an attempt to stop law enforcement obtaining menstrual histories of women in the state.
A bill passed in the Democratic-led state senate, and supported by half the chamber’s Republicans, would have banned search warrants for menstrual data stored in tracking apps on mobile phones or other electronic devices.
Advocates feared private health information could be used in prosecutions for abortion law violations, after a US supreme court ruling last summer overturned federal protections for the procedure.
But Youngkin, who has pushed for a 15-week abortion ban to mirror similar measures in several Republican-controlled states, essentially killed the bill through a procedural move in a subcommittee of the Republican-controlled House.
Citing unspecified future threats to the ability of law enforcement to investigate crime, Maggie Cleary, Youngkin’s deputy secretary of public safety, told the courts of justice subcommittee it was not the legislature’s responsibility to restrict the scope of search warrants.
“While the administration understands the importance of individuals’ privacy … this bill would be the very first of its kind that I’m aware of, in Virginia or anywhere, that would set a limit on what search warrants can do,” she said, according to the Washington Post.
As Republicans line up to run for president in 2024, the Guardian’s Chris McGreal reports that Donald Trump’s former secretary of state has sought to burnish his hardline credentials when it comes to Israel:
Mike Pompeo, the former US secretary of state, has defended Israel’s decades-long control of the Palestinian territories by claiming that the Jewish state has a biblical claim to the land and is therefore not occupying it.
Pompeo told the One Decision podcast that his religious beliefs, US strategic interests and his view of the Palestinian president, Mahmoud Abbas, as a “known terrorist” underpinned his support as the Trump administration’s top diplomat for the shift in US policy away from mediating a two-state solution and toward more openly siding with Israel.
“[Israel] is not an occupying nation. As an evangelical Christian, I am convinced by my reading of the Bible that 3,000 years on now, in spite of the denial of so many, [this land] is the rightful homeland of the Jewish people,” he said.
Updated
Jack Smith, the special counsel tasked with investigating Donald Trump’s role in the January 6 insurrection and attempt to overturn the 2020 election, as well as the presence of classified documents at Mar-a-Lago, is in the midst of at least eight secret court battles to access records or compel testimony, CNN reports.
The court battles are occurring behind-closed-doors as part of Smith’s investigation, and include his attempt to compel Evan Corcoran, a lawyer for the ex-president, to reveal more details of his conversations of Trump, arguing they may contain evidence of a crime.
Here are a few other of the cases Smith is arguing, CNN reports:
The Justice Department’s long-running effort to enforce a May 2022 subpoena for all classified records in Trump’s possession. After a sealed December hearing, Howell gave Smith’s investigators an avenue to ask more questions of two people hired to search Trump’s properties in December and found more documents with classified markings. Those two people testified to the grand jury late last month. Sixteen national media outlets, including CNN, have asked Howell to make public transcripts of hearings and other records in the case.
An appeal over whether former Pence chief counsel Greg Jacob and chief of staff Marc Short should have been forced to answer questions about Trump interactions around January 6. Both went to the grand jury in DC on the same Friday last July and refused to give some answers because of Trump’s attempted claims of confidentiality around the presidency. Court orders prompted them to testify a second time, seeking out more testimony from them in October last year, CNN previously confirmed. They both appeared a second time at the grand jury. The Trump team still has filed an appeal of Howell’s decisions.
An appeal over whether former Trump White House counsel Pat Cipollone and deputy White House counsel Patrick Philbin could decline to answer questions about direct conversations with Trump from the end of his presidency. Both men cited various privileges when they testified to the grand jury in September, but were forced to appear a second time and give more answers after court rulings in November and December, CNN previously confirmed. Though they have already testified twice, Trump’s team filed an appeal.
“Hell, yes.” “100%.” Those were the replies of some Republican state legislators in Georgia to a last-ditch attempt by Donald Trump’s campaign to stop Joe Biden’s election win in the state, the Atlanta Journal-Constitution reports, citing newly released congressional records.
The Trump campaign wanted the group to appoint presidential electors who would vote for Trump, not Joe Biden – even though he’d won the state’s 16 electoral votes, the first time a Democrat has done so since Bill Clinton in 1992.
The publication contacted the approximately 30 lawmakers who said they would participate in the effort, which was ultimately unsuccessful. Seventeen couldn’t be reached, or didn’t respond to a request for comment. But others appeared to deny they’d ever signed on.
“I do think there were some issues with the election. But that was not the way to go,” Republican state representative Kasey Carpenter told the Journal-Constitution.
You can read the rest of the story here.
Updated
Let’s say Fulton county district attorney Fani Willis does decide bring charges against Donald Trump based on the grand jury’s report. What would be the alleged crime? As the Guardian’s Carlisa N. Johnson reported last month, the answer could be racketeering:
An Atlanta prosecutor appears ready to use the same Georgia statute to prosecute Donald Trump that she used last year to charge dozens of gang members and well-known rappers who allegedly conspired to commit violent crime.
Fani Willis was elected Fulton county district attorney just days before the conclusion of the 2020 presidential election. But as she celebrated her promotion, Trump and his allies set in motion a flurry of unfounded claims of voter fraud in Georgia, the state long hailed as a Republican stronghold for local and national elections.
Willis assumed office on 1 January 2021, becoming the first Black woman in the position. The next day, according to reports, Trump called rad Raffensperger, the Georgia secretary of state, urging him to “find” the nearly 12,000 votes he needed to secure a victory and overturn the election results.
The following month, Willis launched an investigation into Trump’s interference in the state’s general election. Now, in a hearing on Tuesday, the special purpose grand jury and the presiding judge will decide whether to release to the public the final report and findings of the grand jury that was seated to investigate Trump and his allies.
Willis, who has not shied away from high-profile cases, has made headlines for her aggressive style of prosecution. Willis was a lead prosecutor in the 2013 prosecution of educators in Atlanta accused of inflating students’ scores on standardized tests. More recently, Willis brought a case against a supposed Georgia gang known as YSL, including charges against rappers Yung Thug and Gunna.
Got questions about the special grand jury’s report in Georgia? The Guardian’s Sam Levine has answers in this piece published just before a hearing in which a judge ultimately opted to allow its partial release:
A court hearing on Tuesday will mark one of the most significant developments in a Georgia investigation examining whether Donald Trump and allies committed a crime in their efforts to overturn the 2020 presidential election. Here’s all you need to know about that hearing and what to expect next.
What exactly is happening on Tuesday?
Since May of last year, a special purpose grand jury in Fulton county, Georgia has been investigating whether Donald Trump committed a crime under state law when he tried to overturn the 2020 election by pressuring state officials to try and overturn Joe Biden’s victory in the state.
The grand jury concluded its work earlier this month. On Tuesday, there will be a hearing to determine whether the grand jury’s report should be made public. The special grand jury – which consisted of 23 jurors and three alternates – has recommended its report be made public.
Why is this investigation such a big deal?
Trump and allies have yet to face any criminal consequences for their efforts to overturn the 2020 election. The Fulton county probe could be the first time that charges are filed against Trump and allies for those efforts. The US House committee that investigated the January 6 attacks also made a criminal referral to the justice department, which is also investigating Trump’s actions after the 2020 election.
Should Donald Trump face criminal charges?
That’s the big question the report authored by a special grand jury in Georgia’s Fulton county might answer. We won’t be seeing all of it today, but what’s released could shed light on what the jurors came to believe after spending months hearing from former Trump officials, state lawmakers and others with knowledge of his attempt to stop Joe Biden from carrying the state’s electoral votes.
The answer to that question could very well be no – at least in the eyes of the jurors. But they might recommend charges against other officials who appeared before them. Trump’s lawyer Rudy Giuliani was, for instance, told that he was a target of the investigation, as was reportedly the state’s lieutenant governor Burt Jones and David Shafer, chair of the Georgia GOP.
But even if the jurors want to bring the hammer down, it’s not their decision to make. That’s up to Fani Willis, the district attorney for the Atlanta-area county, who will have to decide whether to accept their recommendations and move forward with prosecutions.
Georgia grand jury report could reveal legal threat to Trump
Good morning, US politics blog readers. Today, we may get a sense of which direction one of the many investigations into Donald Trump is heading, when parts of a special grand jury’s report into his attempt to undo Joe Biden’s 2020 election win in Georgia are made public. A judge earlier this week ordered the release of the document’s introduction, conclusion and a chapter on jurors’ concerns that some witnesses were lying, while withholding the rest, at least for now. Fani Willis, the district attorney in Georgia’s Atlanta-area Fulton county, is expected to use the report to determine whether to bring charges in the investigations – and against who. This blog will dig into the document as soon as it’s released.
Here’s what else is going on:
Joe Biden may as soon as today give a public address about the Chinese spy balloon and three UFOs shot down by American jets over North America, the Washington Post reports, in a response to pressure from lawmakers who want more transparency on the unusual events.
Barbara Lee, a progressive House Democrat known for her anti-war bona fides, has filed the paperwork to compete in the California Senate race, according to Politico.
Special counsel Jack Smith wants to hear from Mark Meadows, Trump’s chief of staff for his final days in the White House, CNN reports.
